Surgical staplers typically include a cartridge housing a plurality of staples, an anvil for forming the staples as the staples are ejected from the cartridge and a knife to effect simultaneous dissection and suturing of tissue. When compared to applying manually threaded sutures, the use of surgical staplers to suture and dissect tissue has increased the speed of the surgical procedure and thus, minimized patient trauma.
In an endoscopic surgical procedure, a surgical stapler is inserted through a small incision in the skin or through a cannula to access a surgical site within a patent. Typically, staples are driven from a cartridge of the surgical stapler in a direction perpendicular to a tissue contact surface of the cartridge. Due to the complexity of known surgical staplers as well as the staple size requirements of known staple forming apparatus, a continued need exists for small diameter surgical staplers suitable for endoscopic use.